Kingdom Death: Monster – Lunar Aya White Box Review (Patreon)

Aya creeps into another lantern year with a distracting explosion. She appears for the first new moon of the lantern year in festive red, a color that's always brought her some kind of luck. Includes a tactical seed pattern and seed pattern gear to craft the perfect festive diversion.

Contents

• 1 x Lunar Aya Plastic Miniature
• 1 x Vivid Bian Pao seed pattern card
• 1 x Vivid Bian Pao seed pattern gear card
• 1 x Seed Pattern living rules card
• 1x Lunar Aya Art Card
• 1x Buyer's Remorse

Model

There's just one miniature here which is an improvement over last time for releases with game content in them. I've written in the past that the 50mm+ painter's scale plus 35mm game scale miniatures along with game content is not a very good move for the consumer base due to a steep reduction in value for money if you are not a hobbyist. So I will absolutely praise this improvement in the Lunar Aya over the previous Lunar Allison/Twilight Knight and Death Crown Aya releases. If there's demand for a painter's scale version of this miniature, it should be sold separately for hobbyists. 

The miniature is also quite a cute one, while I am biased in that Aya is my second favourite survivor type I still do feel it is an improvement over last year's gameplay scale miniature as it has more character and more significantly is actually holding the gear card that comes in the box. It is always a plus for a model .

So on this front I think that the miniature side of this release is a successful improvement over the previous offering, which is a good step to note. I hope that this kind of release package is encouraged and continues in this direction. 

Gameplay Content

• Resources: 1x Small Feathers, 1x Perfect Hide, 1x Organ
• Pattern Requirements: Heat, Paint Innovation

The Vivid Bian Pao is a Phoenix Seed Pattern gear card, meaning that this is a Node 3 (mid game) tier item and it has quite a steep cost. Not only does it compete with the Phoenix Armor due to having an overlapping resource, but it also requires a Perfect Hide (plus Organ, but that's fine). This means you're either delaying this until after you've gathered everything needed to craft the full armor set or you're delaying Phoenix Armor. As Phoenix Armor is one of the best Armor sets in the mid game, that's an awkward spot to be in.

The Perfect Hide cost can also make crafting a little awkward to navigate as that's a very desirable resource which has other priority crafts for far more important options like the Scavenger Kit and other Pattern Cards. So this is a very awkward and relatively expensive item to craft.

The gear card itself is honestly just a huge pile of absolute garbage; this may well be one of the worst gear cards I've seen in the past five years. It has not one, but two negative keywords – one of which noisy is a game defining 'use this only if it is incredible' negative keyword. But what you get is something that not only can kill you on the hunt when you mess up and get Dune'd; but it also has a terrible showdown ability.

Each act you will put a token on this gear card and then adjacent monsters will all gain a flinch token. Here's the Glossary rules for Flinch Tokens if you can't remember what they do.

Now a Flinch Token is a relatively decent thing to gain, but it is important to note that the Vivid Bian Pao doesn't have an activation icon, it starts on the first turn. A turn where you are (outside of ambushes and other methods/abilities) not guaranteed to start your act adjacent to the monster. When the monster goes first it's likely this will happen, but there will be rounds where the monster just isn't in the position you need them to be. I will note an additional positive is that this will impact on multiple adjacent monsters at the same time, making it better vs them.

It'll continue to drop one Flinch token on adjacent monsters, gaining a token itself, until it has 5+ tokens. At which point it'll archive itself, the holding survivor's hearing and one of their arms.

So we have an item card that delivers a decent, but not amazing, token type in Flinch Tokens. That has a limited lifespan before needing to be recrafted with phoenix and perfect resource due to it self archiving unless you can end the showdown within 5 rounds. It also has noisy, so it might not even reach the showdown board (and in a typical campaign you will run into the Harvester at least once). And on top of all of that; when it archives itself it delivers not one, but two debilitating severe injuries. 

Flinch Tokens are not that good. If you hate reactions that much just get a Katar specialist.

Summary

Honestly the only explanation I can come up with for this item is it is a troll. While thematically it is very rich, the mechanical expression of something that costs a perfect resource, archives itself, has noisy, disables the wielding survivor, has zero affinities and clogs up your pattern deck when the phoenix is a part of your campaign is just a new low. I don't know who came up with this, but all I can assume is that they find the joke very funny.  This is the equivalent of a bad bulk common card from a TCG only coming in an expensive box with a premium miniature of the character on the card included. I only consider the miniature here the reason to purchase this, because the content itself makes your pattern deck just a little bit worse when you have the Phoenix in your campaign.

Final Verdict: Never buy this for the gameplay content and this boxes' greatest achievement is that it has established a new bottom tier for ranking things. Lantern Aya tier.  Stick with 2023s Lunar Knight release, which has its faults because the hunt event doesn't archive itself, but it is a good little bit of content even if the box price is inflated due to that second oversized miniature.

Personally I'm not going to spend any more words on this one outside of this review.